Sentence Examples

Such mentally endowed substances might be called souls; but, as he distinguished between perception and apperception or consciousness, and considered that perceptions are often unconscious, he preferred to divide monads into unconscious entelechies of inorganic bodies, sentient souls of animals, and rational souls, or spirits, of men; while he further concluded that all these are derivative monads created by God, the monad of monads.

As to the origin of knowledge, Kant's position is that sense, outer and inner, affected by things in themselves, receives mere sensations or sensible ideas (Vorstellungen) as the matter which sense itself places in the a priori forms of space and time; that thereupon understanding, by means of the synthetic unity of apperception, " I think " - an act of spontaneity beyond sense, in all consciousness one and the same, and combining all my ideas as mine in one universal consciousness - and under a priori categories, or fundamental notions, such as substance and attribute, cause and effect, &c., unites groups of sensations or sensible ideas into objects and events, e.g.

In detail, to express this supposed inner will of thinking, he borrows from Leibnitz and Kant the term " apperception," but in a sense of his own.

Leibnitz, by way of distinction from unconscious perception, gave the name " apperception " to consciousness.

Wundt, in consequence, thinking with Kant that apperception is a spontaneous activity, and with Fichte that this activity requires will, and indeed that all activity is will, infers that apperception is inner will.